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Part I
The Repression


Nunca Más (Never Again) - Report of Conadep  - 1984
 

 

Disappearance and death of Jacobo Chester - File N° 1333


The gory scenes experienced by the staff of the Professor Alejandro Posadas National Hospital in the Haedo district of Buenos Aires province provide evidence of one way in which victims' bodies were made to disappear: by being thrown into the waters of the River Plate.

On 26 November 1976, Jacobo Chester, an employee of the Department of Statistics and Hospital Registration at the hospital, was kidnapped and taken from his home by a group of armed men who decided amid shouted commands what to do with each item they stole. They only failed to rape his daughter, a child of twelve, because they did not have time. In the midst of all this brutal treatment she managed to ask: 'Where should I go to find my dad?', to which the answer was: 'To the ditches, that's where you'll have to go.'

According to the evidence in file No. 1537, Gladys E. Cuervo denounces her own kidnapping and imprisonment in the same hospital. There she was beaten up by two men simultaneously. They gave her submarino torture, broke her breastbone and several ribs, and burnt her in various places with cigarettes. She found out that several people who are still missing had been there, including Dr Jorge Mario Roitman, whom she saw 'in a pool of blood and urine', adding:

'I heard about Chester too, from comments Juan [a torturer] made to me about how he was weak and couldn't take the electric prod.'

A year after the kidnapping, a court in Buenos Aires city summoned Señora Chester to inform her that her husband's dead body had been found in the River Plate on 2 December 1976, six days after his disappearance, when he had passed through the judicial morgue.

The entry in the official death register mentions as the cause of death: asphyxia by drowning and multiple trauma.

 

 

 


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